Holding Company: Chaucer’s Franklin’s Tale in the Faerie Queene

• Helen Cooper

The admiration for and familiarity with Chaucer in the late sixteenth century was expressed most extensively by Edmund Spenser, who gives his fullest direct quotation from his predecessor’s work early in Book III of the Faerie Queene. The lines in question, from the Franklin’s Tale, form the major part of the first speech given to Britomart, the heroine of the central books of the epic, so carry additional weight from that centrality. The quotation relates most immediately to Britomart as the exemplar of good love, but its context in both the Tale and the Faerie Queene enlarges its reference to the need for tolerance in social relations more broadly: a need that continues into Book IV, on friendship; Book V, which takes up the issue of ‘maistrie’; and VI, on courtesy, Chaucer’s ‘gentilesse’. It thus sets a standard for conduct throughout much of the poem, and could indeed be regarded as Chaucer’s own advice to his readers.